15 ms·

Language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades

283 points by jbotz 5y ago

triska 5y ago
A very nicely done and interesting study on a very relevant topic, with worrying results. Thank you for sharing this! I found the following quote particularly interesting: "It is suggestive that the timing of the US surge in CDS prevalence coincides with the late 1970s when wages stopped tracking increasing work productivity."
- civilized 5y ago
  > It is suggestive that the timing of the US surge in CDS prevalence coincides with the late 1970s when wages stopped tracking increasing work productivity. I don't agree with the authors' summary of their own graphs. If you look at the graphs, it's more like "cognitive distortions hit an all-time low around 1980, began slowly inching back up from 1980-2000, then accelerated more rapidly upwards after 2000, leading to a clear trend break by 2005 or so." I've also heard conflicting info about this and would like a more definitive analysis if anyone knows of one. I've seen people claim that total comp, including especially health care benefits, did not stagnate and continued to track productivity.
  - kian 5y ago
    It feels quite possible to me that, despite total comp tracking productivity, wages ceasing to track work productivity could still cause increased anxiety due to a lack of choice in how to spend that fraction of compensation. Health Care as a job benefit ensures that that fraction of compensation is always spent on health services, at minimum. In many ways it is more of a subsidy to health insurance companies and health care providers.
- yosito 5y ago
  Summary of the study based on the comments I've read so far: "People are saying 'I am a...' a lot more than they used to, which proves that the world is going to shit because most people haven't been paid what they're entitled to for their whole lives"... this "study" seems like absolute trash science, someone's opinions and narrow interpretations dressed up as some kind of higher form of knowledge.
Hokusai 5y ago
Looking at the graphics it seems that the start of the pattern is closer to Reaganomics than Facebook for the English speaking world. For German and Spanish started way later, closer to social media. So, maybe in the USA it started early and the it spread to other parts of the world thru social media. One way or another it seems important to study the reasons and the effects of such change of language.
- malandrew 5y ago
  One thing to consider is that cable TV with many channels proliferated 1-2 decades earlier in the US than most other countries. We had 40+ channels and the resultant social splintering of interests much earlier as a result. It wasn't until satellite TV became a thing that many parts of the world could get more than a handful of over the air channels.
- lrdswrk00 5y ago
  Social media invented by US industry, that was mutated by Reaganomics. Interesting.
- Izkata 5y ago
  This first big spike is labeled 1999, that's probably Y2K. Then came 9/11, then MySpace launched in 2003. Reaganomics was the early 1980s, not sure how you're seeing it as closer to the spike than social media.
jgilias 5y ago
An interesting effect. It's just that the naming could somehow be better. It feels weird to call a cognitive _distortion_ some collective zeitgeist that apparently correctly identifies a situation when shit has really hit the fan. I mean, why would it be a 'distortion' to be somewhat fatalistic about the current climate change trend that may actually lead to civilizational collapse and an extinction event.
- mikeiz404 5y ago
  I see your point and I used to think this too to an extent but I think it’s worth appreciating that we are looking from the outside in to a highly specialized domain and like most of these domains it has developed its own unique set of language and definitions. And that paper is written for people in that domain / community, not for those outside of it.
- overton 5y ago
  Exactly. This article comes with the typical psychiatrist bias that depression is indication of some personal deficit (cognitive distortions or faulty brain chemistry) when in my personal view, given the state of the world there are many good reasons to be depressed.
  - jkhdigital 5y ago
    And there weren’t plenty of reasons in the past? Do you read history at all?
    - overton 5y ago
      sure I do. as another comment pointed out, the trend roughly tracks the decoupling of wages from productivity in North America. seems as good of a reason for disillusionment as one could find.
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        > the trend roughly tracks the decoupling of wages from productivity in North America. seems as good of a reason for disillusionment as one could find. How about famine, war, epidemics wiping out a third of the population, totalitarian oppression, etc.?
TechBro8615 5y ago
The data seems to support that people in America who write books are depressed.
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
If you look up at the sky and say "oh its sunny today", you are overgeneralizing because you haven't seen the rest of the city. If you had worn masks or started being cautious before COVID was widely acknowledged, you were catastrophizing. If you ever talk or act based on a mental model you have of a friend, you are mindreading. "Cognitive distortions" are the only tools we have to reason about anything in the presence of limited information (which is basically always). Its basically a toolbox to let you discredit any thought whatsoever, which is convenient when a patient writes down negative thoughts and the psychiatrist can just hand them a list. But it would work just as well on positive thoughts or any thought whatsoever.
- Swizec 5y ago
  > But it would work just as well on positive thoughts Have you heard of toxic positivity? There’s a growing movement against incessant positivity that has become endemic to a lot of online discourse in particular on Instagram (def not on twitter). Nothing ever sucks, it’s a challenge! Nobody is sick, they’re a fighter! Nobody is a mean prick, you just need to understand their perspective! Nothing you do is ever stupid, people are just haters!
  - austincheney 5y ago
    I more frequently encounter toxic negativity on HN in subjects that devolve to anything remotely social. * That parent isn’t setting boundaries for a child, they’re just mean. * Isn’t that they fully acknowledged your thoughts and chose something to the contrary, they aren’t listening. * Isn’t that they fail to shed tears when trying to understand other people, it’s that they have no empathy (this is actually sympathy, but whatever). I want to say it’s teenagers or highly sheltered people having an emotional moment, but these wonderful people claim otherwise. Worse, like teenagers, when comes to anything remotely social everybody is an expert, never wrong, and somehow knows all about other people real life situations.
  - vishnugupta 5y ago
    > Have you heard of toxic positivity? I suspect it’s a byproduct of “enlightenment now” movement which asserts that humans haven’t had it so good as they do now. Worldwide poverty is the lowest ever, least violence etc. There’s a minor issue of growing inequality and impending climate disasters but that’s all ok and will work out well. Its torchbearer is Steven Pinker and he’s ably supported by, unsurprisingly, the richest 0.1%.
blunte 5y ago
Does this study consider the modern ease of getting a work to be publicly available? Publishing, in some form, is so much easier now than it was 20 years ago. Is it possible that publishers of the past just said, "no, we don't want so much depressing stuff."?
- malandrew 5y ago
  Now they have the analytical tools given to them by the tech industry to say "Yes, we need more of this depressing stuff because it's most profitable" To make matters worse, journalism is not longer a career that provides a path to a respectable middle to upper middle class life, so you have an entire profession where those working in that profession have generally depressive prospects in life. Want to make society content? Keep journalists content.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  From the abstract: > This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample
civilized 5y ago
These are interesting data, but heavily sensationalized, overinterpreted and editorialized - as per usual from this notorious "tabloid journal", as statistics professor Andrew Gelman calls them. For example, the methodology for detecting "cognitive distortions" is extremely simplistic, relying on short phrases like "I am a", "everyone thinks", and "still feels". It is far from clear what an increase in people saying "I am a" means, and what it really implies about the rate of genuine cognitive distortions or depressive thought patterns in the population. The reasoning here is basically "X correlates with Y, X is up, therefore Y is up". That's not a strong argument. These data are a starting point, not a conclusion. The authors also seem to be leaning so far into a desired narrative that they can't accurately read their own graphs. The rapid rise in CDS clearly begins around 2000 - not the late 1970s, which are just the low point of the graph.
- rhizome 5y ago
  Hmmm, maybe it could be called something like "syllogistic materialism?" It's a predictable badness that these "revelations" are specific sentiments about what follows, aka "the nouns" (more or less). "Still feels X," "I am a Y," "everyone thinks Z," all require that X, Y, and Z all have fixed meanings.
- christophilus 5y ago
  Sounds like you’re saying the authors suffer from cognitive distortions. They’re disproving their point by proving their own point.
  - civilized 5y ago
    Their work is definitely an illustration of precisely what they're talking about.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  In their defense, I tend to think social science is shoehorned into an academic formula that it can never really fit into. You kind of have to have a hypothesis, then "test" it with data. A more reasonable approach (IMO) would be "We found this interesting phenomenon" followed by inevitably speculative interpretation. That's realistically how it works in practice, but to be published you need to fit a popperian formula. A more ponderous version of this probably wouldn't have been accepted. I mean, using a method of diagnosing depressed individuals on a collective psychology of a society is already veering into wtf territory, in terms of interpretation. OTOH, it is interesting and probably significant somehow. IDK how or what they could have done better, and this does seem like a result worth publishing, assuming the methodology is good. Ultimately, I think people reading the paper mostly read it that way anyhow. Authors found X. Seems interesting. Here's how they're interpreting it. Here's my speculation. Journalists OTOH, they'll cite the hypothesis verbatim if it fits the article they're writing. I think that's where the shoehorning is a problem. As long as you're reading the paper directly yourself, who cares what order the paragraphs are in.
ma2rten 5y ago
I don’t think the methodology is showing anything conclusively. The peak could be due to a linguistic shift or due to a difference in the type of work being published. Even if books use phrases like “I am a” more often I don’t think that necessarily means people have more cognitive distortions and if people have more cognitive distortions that doesn’t necessarily mean they are more depressed (only the inverse has been shown afaik).
api 5y ago
Maybe tangential but I have had the sense for the past ten years that something is wrong with human cognition. When I look at the popular ideas on all sides of the political spectrum, the trend seems to have been toward ideas that are not only more one dimensional and extreme but more irrational and incoherent. I regularly come across online comments that are borderline word salad, a blathering incoherent mess of the sort that would in the past have immediately led to questions about schizophrenia. It doesn’t seem to be a specific idea so much as a decline in the lucidity and coherence of cognition itself. The ideas are inane, but I can’t imagine such inane ideas taking hold to such an extent in earlier eras. I have only two hypotheses that seem like they make sense: gamified social media and CO2 concentration impacting metabolism. I lean strongly toward the former because around 2010 is when algorithmic timelines started to be introduced and it was right around then that I remember a tangible sense of sharp decline. I had to include the latter for completeness, but I hope not as the latter would be far scarier. Social media companies are the tobacco companies and opiate dealers of the information age. The more I see of them the more I am convinced they are an objective evil and create net negative value. The algorithmic weighting of content for engagement seems to be the real problem, but it’s at the heart of their business model now.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  The more I see of them the more I am convinced they are an objective evil and create net negative value. With invoking the words, "absolute evil", you seem to also take part of your observed trend: When I look at the popular ideas on all sides of the political spectrum, the trend seems to have been toward ideas that are not only more one dimensional and extreme
- mistermann 5y ago
  I agree...it's easy to not notice I think, but I definitely have the same impression that the aggregate mental health of internet users is degrading in various ways. The mind ingests a massive number of variables as it renders reality, we have pretty decent (if primitive) knowledge of the flaws in this device, and the number of changes in the system in the last few decades is substantial...who knows wtf is really going on inside the 7 billion black box reality machines out there! What we know for sure is that there is major malfunctions going on anywhere one looks, and that's only the ones we are able to see. I think running a similar analysis as this (and other analyses) on the last 10 years of popular mainstream subreddits would yield some interesting results. Or, perhaps a new meta-social-network of some sort will appear on the scene that can point a portion of our massive biological compute power at the phenomenon and try to gain some understanding of it. I worry that if something isn't done, the system might start falling apart.
curation 5y ago
It is because the only logic we have left is Market Logic and the only ethical barrier we have left between us and violence is The Economy. The Economy is entirely faith based. And our faith is waning, and among younger generations, is gone. To survive in Market Logic we must act as though we believe we are fully individuated and on our own with bootstraps tugged. But how we actually live is totally, globally interdependent. The pandemic, on top of this, insists on it. This is the source of cognitive dissonance. ( JP Dupuy The Economy and The Future)
- voidhorse 5y ago
  Quite a few theorists have stated things along the same lines, and I think the analysis is generally correct. After the “death of god”, man lost a common frame of reference and replaced highly spiritualized modes of existence for highly economic modes of existence. Well, now we are facing the “death of the market” and finally realizing that it is a destructive fiction and that it is not reasonable to reduce everything to exchange value and calculation insofar as it leads to the actual existential crisis that is climate cataclysm.
  - yissp 5y ago
    What will we replace it with this time?
    - Animats 5y ago
      I don't know. We're running out of sources of trust. Lawyers? No. Bankers? No. Political leaders? No. Captains of industry? No. Journalists? Almost extinct. We hit bottom when the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts both turned out to have thousands of pedophiles in positions of authority.
      - mvc 5y ago
        > We hit bottom when the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts both turned out to have thousands of pedophiles in positions of authority. Of course prior to 1980, the church had never done anything to harm those it claimed to care for. Not sure why Catholics are singled out here.
derbOac 5y ago
It's telling that a search for the term "sentiment" in the article yields nothing. It's an obvious companion analysis.
- ignoranceprior 5y ago
  I'd be curious to see how sentiment analysis of contemporary writing has changed over time. That would be easier to interpret than this metric too.
- stereolambda 5y ago
  As far as I understand sentiment analysis is more of a pragmatic pursuit, and the prototypical use case is reviews of things or creations. It's a business tool and not science. As general language/literature has no set object, I don't see how we could even interpret long term "analyses" of it. It's good that the authors are at least trying to create some generally interpretable categories mapped into language, even if they may not be (yet) fully convincing, as other commenters point out.
cryptica 5y ago
The economy is a negative sum game and so, while the rich keep getting richer and their friends keep getting richer, opportunities for the majority of people are drying up. It becomes increasingly easy for the rich to earn money and increasingly difficult for the poor to earn money. Almost everyone who rich people interact with are at least relatively well off and doesn't have to work too hard for their money so they don't see or relate to the suffering and hopelessness of the poor who are desperately competiting for their attention. Wherever the rich look, things start improving - But where they don't look (which is most places), things are always getting worse. In this crony-capitalist system, the attention of a rich person is as good as money. The monetary system is to blame for this. When currency isn't backed by anything, the economy and society becomes 100% about capturing the attention of rich people. You cannot compete in this system without the approval of rich people. No matter how much better value your products or services may be; you can never compete because their earnings are mixed in with easy money straight from the money printers, yours aren't - You can never beat the margins of a big corporation which has direct currency pipelines to hedge funds, governments, etc... Money should not be so important but when you are far from the money printers, it's the only thing a rational person can think about. Getting the attention of rich people is the only way to get closer to the money printers. It's not a distortion to see things as negative or bleak. Things really are bleak for most people. The real distortion is thinking that everything is fine.
- cryptica 5y ago
  The comment must have hit a nerve because people are almost outvoting the downvote bots.
Animats 5y ago
This is a very simple analysis. Here's the phrase list: [1] It's quite short. It's clear how they get the numbers, but not clear what, if anything, they indicate. A big problem is that they only count one side. "Fortune-telling: Making predictions, usually negative ones, about the future" - counts the phrases: "I will not, we will not, you will not, they will not, it will not, that will not, he will not, she will not". One would expect that they'd also count "I will, "we will", etc. and show a ratio. But no. This is measuring something, but what? [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2021/07/22/2102061118.DCSupplemental/pnas.2102061118.sapp.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2021/07/22/210206111...
- rdiddly 5y ago
  Not to mention that "I will get cancer" is a positive statement under that rubric, and "I will not have any problems" is negative. Shocker, you kind of need the rest of the sentence to extract meaning!
- Pyramus 5y ago
  > One would expect that they'd also count "I will, "we will", etc. and show a ratio. But no. No - what you want to measure is the absolute number of occurrence, not the ratio, the reason being that "making negative predictions" is not the opposite of "making positive predictions". Similar to the fact that negative and positive affect aren't opposites but distinct factors (that share some correlation though!). 'Common sense' can easily lead you astray here. It's a good example for something that looks simple, but really isn't.
cblconfederate 5y ago
Corresponds with the large drop in testosterone levels seen in the past 4 decades, which the authors did not consider in their discussion. Revise and resubmit
PaulHoule 5y ago
It is an incredible result, my first thought is that it depends so much on the sampling of what books get published, and what books wind up in the maw of google books. I have done things like look at specific dates that turn up in Wikipedia and you see some things that are real but when you get close to the time frame Wikipedia existed sampling effects are strong. It would be fun to look at ‘I am a *’ though.
eyelovewe 5y ago
I blame it all on that one Beck song, plus that one Radiohead song
- boriselec 5y ago
  Loser/Creep were songs of that time. Loser is kinda optimistic though.
ris 5y ago
Complete sidenote, but when did google n-grams start getting attention again? Last I looked at it it seemed pretty dead and unlikely to see any further updates. Now not only is it updated but it has a lot of features I don't remember seeing before e.g. wildcards and part-of-speech wildcards https://books.google.com/ngrams/info https://books.google.com/ngrams/info
- saalweachter 5y ago
  They also started getting new data again. For the longest time, it ended in 2000, IIRC. My previous go-to ngram to link was "participation trophy"[0], which previously had its biggest spike in the 1950s. There's a massive spike now, starting 2006 or 2008, but my rhetorical point still stands: participation trophies were a big thing -- in writing, anyway -- when Boomers were kids, not Millennials. [0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=participation+trophy&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cparticipation%20trophy%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=participation+...
dalbasal 5y ago
The data is quite interesting, but the hypothesis (imo) is far from the only plausible explanation. I'm not saying this to disparage the work, just to frame. "Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual’s mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books..." Interesting result: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/30/e2102061118/F4.large.jpg https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/30/e2102061118/F4.larg... So... the finding is that language patterns typically associated with depression have rapidly become common in book language. Interesting. The interpretation is up for debate, I suppose. Maybe its just writers are more depressed. Financial events are labeled, but they don't seem to have impacted the data much. Internet usage, OTOH, seems (at a glance) highly correlated to whatever they're measuring. Maybe online culture moved language in this direction with no real relationship to depression. Maybe the internet made people more depressed. Maybe the internet made writers more depressed. Maybe some complicated knot of those. IE, the internet popularized maladaptive language, which has made us all more depressed. In any case, assuming the methodology is reasonable, it does look like they've found something here. Worth a discussion.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  I'd be tempted to say the language patterns could be the most interesting thing. They're something that you could was more widely and objectively measurable than "depression". Starting with language patterns and seeing what they're most strongly associated with might be interesting.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > Maybe its just writers are more depressed. That doesn't disagree with the hypothesis that it's a society-wide phenomenon.
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airhead969 5y ago
I would posit increased population, shift to cities, fewer close friends, less family relationships, less community, declining interdependency, lower standards of living, and less hope for the future all contribute to depression and so cognitive distortions.
briefcomment 5y ago
What I'm interested in seeing is the types of phrases that dropped during this time period. What is not considered a sign of "cognitive distortion"?
chiefalchemist 5y ago
Has there been a surge, or were previously such things suppressed? Also, most books are marketed via publishers which means there is filter (read: bias) in what gets published and what does not. It's an interesting idea (i.e., analyze books) but the context is going to influence the results.
gmuslera 5y ago
Focusing in just authors may make this fall into the Simpson's Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox), if you look at the bigger set the clear trend may vanish. Even if authors are part of the population and living (some of) the influences that the general population have, there are a whole ecosystem and pressures that should be taken into account, including changes in the editorial ecosystem with time. There are other sets of public data that may or not track the general population, like social networks activity, blog posts and comments on different sites. But that is affected by changes in culture, population and external influences (including disinformation campaings), and the selection of sites may select also the kind of users that may add a bias to the results. I wonder what deviations would be seen at i.e. slashdot that should have around 25 years of comments, with all the previous objections that I already said.
lai-yin 5y ago
5 years ago my therapist handed me a sheet of paper titled "Checklist of Cognitive Distortions." Ten negative modes of thought. I didn't immediately grasp how ingrained each one was in my mindset and habits - it took years and I'm still learning. And one thing I've learned is that there is a wide incentive to embed cognitive distortions in the news, stories, and attitudes which comprise culture. Telling people they are victims of more powerful forces beyond their individual control. Victimhood mentality is the worst mindset a person can have. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemies.
- yobbo 5y ago
  > Telling people they are victims of more powerful forces beyond their individual control. First, being victim of forces beyond their control is true for almost everyone. Secondly, it's probably more healthy for people to not understand or believe it.
  - yourenotsmart 5y ago
    I find it a bit discouraging that the scientific consensus on what's a proper or wrong belief is entirely subject to cultural circumstances local in time and place. Displace any individual considered healthy about 5 decades back or forward and they'll appear unstable. Make it 5 centuries and they'll basically appear fully psychotic (and not just because they just travelled through time).
  - orzig 5y ago
    As with so many things, the answer probably lies in the middle. Any of us could be killed by lightning at any time, but 99.99% of us have the power to avoid being struck by a train. Most outcomes, good and bad, lay between those extremes.
  - atoav 5y ago
    > First, being victim of forces beyond their control is true for almost everyone. I think this misunderstands the crucial difference here. The phenomenom described is not about power dynamics, it is about storytelling: Many don't even care to investigate whether there are really powers there who are at fault for their suffering. In fact it is quite the opposite: Because they feel special as individuals they cannot stand the idea that some powerful force damages them as mere collateral, because this would mean to admit to be small and insignificant. At least I'd say this is the conclusion they would typically reach after looking into the real causal relationships behind the powers and their lives based on facts. However, it might be much more comforting to tell yourself a story in which "they" target you or your people specifically and intentionally. The more evil you can paint "them" the better, because it makes your cause more noble and heroic. Telling yourself these kind of stories might be comforting, but cements the role you are playing within that society: Forever a sucker, a playball of forces you cannot comprehend, easy to manipulate, gullible, afraid, angry. Healthy as long as you don't march to Russia like my Nazi-grandfather did when he was 16.
lamontcg 5y ago
After having spent way too long arguing with people on reddit, I'd certainly tend to agree with the hypothesis, even if the claimed evidence has a pile of holes. And not just politics. Most people can't analyze a car accident without a pile of cognitive distortions.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  Then there's this: "I’m a Parkland Shooting Survivor. QAnon Convinced My Dad It Was All a Hoax." https://www.vice.com/en/article/epnq84/im-a-parkland-shooting-survivor-qanon-convinced-my-dad-it-was-all-a-hoax https://www.vice.com/en/article/epnq84/im-a-parkland-shootin...
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ALittleLight 5y ago
I saw on Twitter that you can search for "he said,she said" and you get massive recent spikes suggesting a change in the composition of Google's data. (i.e. More fiction where characters are saying things) https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=he+said%2Cshe+said&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Che%20said%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cshe%20said%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=he+said%2Cshe+...
est 5y ago
Is this Flynn effect in action?
wishawa 5y ago
The phrases are proven/believed to correlate with Cognitive Distortions, but that is when they are used in conversations, or diaries, or maybe short writings. Not in books, which are very different from those things. Doctors don't ask a patient to write an entire book and count these phrases to determine whether or not the patient have Cognitive Distortion.
sadness3 5y ago
I challenge this: > whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways Is it not possible for 'rock and hard place' depression to be an _accurate_ negativity about the world in the face of oftentimes seemingly impending climate disaster?
Gauge_Irrahphe 5y ago
It's from the lack of heavy metals - lead is necessary for transporting glucose to the axon, and its deficiency leads to massive synapse loss and resulting mental illness. The data that supposedly prove heavy metal toxicity are extremely suspect, sometimes outright bizarre. 1. They are elements, so no major changes could possibly occur. Thry appear in all recent geological history. 2. Their toxicity somehow went unnoticed until recently. There are no records of cadmium being considered toxic before 1970. Somehow nobody noticed the toxicity of the most toxic known metal. Thallium was noticed to be toxic soon after its discovery. Lead was only known to cause poisonings in very large amounts and mostly limited to breathing exposure, and was used in things like make up and even sweeteners. Presumably any noticeable toxicity would prevent it from being used in such cases. 3. The purpoted mechanism is absurd. The body picks the metals to be incorporated proteins with great accuracy, and pick the heavy metal, which poisons the protein and activates it when it should be inactive. It just sounds completely absurd to me. 4. Heavy metals only accumulate until certain concentrations are reached, then they start getting excreted. This effect is widely noted.
- jbotz 5y ago
  Interesting. Any references, further reading?
  - Gauge_Irrahphe 5y ago
    See the link above. Also notice the supression of mTOR.
- ashleyn 5y ago
  > It's from the lack of heavy metals - lead is necessary for transporting glucose to the axon, and its deficiency leads to massive synapse loss and resulting mental illness. I'm going to need a reference for this because I was under the impression that there is no safe level for lead in the body, and it serves no biological purpose.
  - Gauge_Irrahphe 5y ago
yourenotsmart 5y ago
So they put any instance of a phrase like "... it feels like ..." as emotional reasoning? Say, "it feels like it'll rain"? I question their data analysis.
ad 5y ago
The paper picks 1980 as the start year…interesting because the recent HN article about obesity-caused-by-contamination post also picked 1980: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27936016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27936016 Perhaps spurious, but could be seen as more evidence for the contamination theory, since depression and weight gain are correlated.
rrauenza 5y ago
For more information on cognitive ditortions, this article does a nice summary... It also claims a similar observation in colleges back in 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod...
silentguy 5y ago
I think this could be driven by personalization of internet content. It started with the innocuous idea of presenting only the information you need. And, it turned into a system of echo chambers where your world view would be limited to certain ideas that you are comfortable with. And, it leads to lots of cognitive distortions. Also, the abundance of media on the internet force the content of the media to be louder for it to be visible. Nuance has to give way to crass generalization to get deeper media engagement. I seriously worry about the trend and I am not very hopeful about the direction it takes.

283 points by jbotz 5y ago

A very nicely done and interesting study on a very relevant topic, with worrying results. Thank you for sharing this! I found the following quote particularly interesting: "It is suggestive that the timing of the US surge in CDS prevalence coincides with the late 1970s when wages stopped tracking increasing work productivity."

civilized 5y ago
> It is suggestive that the timing of the US surge in CDS prevalence coincides with the late 1970s when wages stopped tracking increasing work productivity. I don't agree with the authors' summary of their own graphs. If you look at the graphs, it's more like "cognitive distortions hit an all-time low around 1980, began slowly inching back up from 1980-2000, then accelerated more rapidly upwards after 2000, leading to a clear trend break by 2005 or so." I've also heard conflicting info about this and would like a more definitive analysis if anyone knows of one. I've seen people claim that total comp, including especially health care benefits, did not stagnate and continued to track productivity.
- kian 5y ago
  It feels quite possible to me that, despite total comp tracking productivity, wages ceasing to track work productivity could still cause increased anxiety due to a lack of choice in how to spend that fraction of compensation. Health Care as a job benefit ensures that that fraction of compensation is always spent on health services, at minimum. In many ways it is more of a subsidy to health insurance companies and health care providers.
yosito 5y ago
Summary of the study based on the comments I've read so far: "People are saying 'I am a...' a lot more than they used to, which proves that the world is going to shit because most people haven't been paid what they're entitled to for their whole lives"... this "study" seems like absolute trash science, someone's opinions and narrow interpretations dressed up as some kind of higher form of knowledge.

Hokusai 5y ago

Looking at the graphics it seems that the start of the pattern is closer to Reaganomics than Facebook for the English speaking world. For German and Spanish started way later, closer to social media. So, maybe in the USA it started early and the it spread to other parts of the world thru social media. One way or another it seems important to study the reasons and the effects of such change of language.

malandrew 5y ago
One thing to consider is that cable TV with many channels proliferated 1-2 decades earlier in the US than most other countries. We had 40+ channels and the resultant social splintering of interests much earlier as a result. It wasn't until satellite TV became a thing that many parts of the world could get more than a handful of over the air channels.
lrdswrk00 5y ago
Social media invented by US industry, that was mutated by Reaganomics. Interesting.
Izkata 5y ago
This first big spike is labeled 1999, that's probably Y2K. Then came 9/11, then MySpace launched in 2003. Reaganomics was the early 1980s, not sure how you're seeing it as closer to the spike than social media.

jgilias 5y ago

An interesting effect. It's just that the naming could somehow be better. It feels weird to call a cognitive _distortion_ some collective zeitgeist that apparently correctly identifies a situation when shit has really hit the fan. I mean, why would it be a 'distortion' to be somewhat fatalistic about the current climate change trend that may actually lead to civilizational collapse and an extinction event.

mikeiz404 5y ago
I see your point and I used to think this too to an extent but I think it’s worth appreciating that we are looking from the outside in to a highly specialized domain and like most of these domains it has developed its own unique set of language and definitions. And that paper is written for people in that domain / community, not for those outside of it.
overton 5y ago
Exactly. This article comes with the typical psychiatrist bias that depression is indication of some personal deficit (cognitive distortions or faulty brain chemistry) when in my personal view, given the state of the world there are many good reasons to be depressed.
- jkhdigital 5y ago
  And there weren’t plenty of reasons in the past? Do you read history at all?
  - overton 5y ago
    sure I do. as another comment pointed out, the trend roughly tracks the decoupling of wages from productivity in North America. seems as good of a reason for disillusionment as one could find.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > the trend roughly tracks the decoupling of wages from productivity in North America. seems as good of a reason for disillusionment as one could find. How about famine, war, epidemics wiping out a third of the population, totalitarian oppression, etc.?

TechBro8615 5y ago

The data seems to support that people in America who write books are depressed.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

If you look up at the sky and say "oh its sunny today", you are overgeneralizing because you haven't seen the rest of the city. If you had worn masks or started being cautious before COVID was widely acknowledged, you were catastrophizing. If you ever talk or act based on a mental model you have of a friend, you are mindreading. "Cognitive distortions" are the only tools we have to reason about anything in the presence of limited information (which is basically always). Its basically a toolbox to let you discredit any thought whatsoever, which is convenient when a patient writes down negative thoughts and the psychiatrist can just hand them a list. But it would work just as well on positive thoughts or any thought whatsoever.

Swizec 5y ago
> But it would work just as well on positive thoughts Have you heard of toxic positivity? There’s a growing movement against incessant positivity that has become endemic to a lot of online discourse in particular on Instagram (def not on twitter). Nothing ever sucks, it’s a challenge! Nobody is sick, they’re a fighter! Nobody is a mean prick, you just need to understand their perspective! Nothing you do is ever stupid, people are just haters!
- austincheney 5y ago
  I more frequently encounter toxic negativity on HN in subjects that devolve to anything remotely social. * That parent isn’t setting boundaries for a child, they’re just mean. * Isn’t that they fully acknowledged your thoughts and chose something to the contrary, they aren’t listening. * Isn’t that they fail to shed tears when trying to understand other people, it’s that they have no empathy (this is actually sympathy, but whatever). I want to say it’s teenagers or highly sheltered people having an emotional moment, but these wonderful people claim otherwise. Worse, like teenagers, when comes to anything remotely social everybody is an expert, never wrong, and somehow knows all about other people real life situations.
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  > Have you heard of toxic positivity? I suspect it’s a byproduct of “enlightenment now” movement which asserts that humans haven’t had it so good as they do now. Worldwide poverty is the lowest ever, least violence etc. There’s a minor issue of growing inequality and impending climate disasters but that’s all ok and will work out well. Its torchbearer is Steven Pinker and he’s ably supported by, unsurprisingly, the richest 0.1%.

blunte 5y ago

Does this study consider the modern ease of getting a work to be publicly available? Publishing, in some form, is so much easier now than it was 20 years ago. Is it possible that publishers of the past just said, "no, we don't want so much depressing stuff."?

malandrew 5y ago
Now they have the analytical tools given to them by the tech industry to say "Yes, we need more of this depressing stuff because it's most profitable" To make matters worse, journalism is not longer a career that provides a path to a respectable middle to upper middle class life, so you have an entire profession where those working in that profession have generally depressive prospects in life. Want to make society content? Keep journalists content.
wolverine876 5y ago
From the abstract: > This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample

civilized 5y ago

These are interesting data, but heavily sensationalized, overinterpreted and editorialized - as per usual from this notorious "tabloid journal", as statistics professor Andrew Gelman calls them. For example, the methodology for detecting "cognitive distortions" is extremely simplistic, relying on short phrases like "I am a", "everyone thinks", and "still feels". It is far from clear what an increase in people saying "I am a" means, and what it really implies about the rate of genuine cognitive distortions or depressive thought patterns in the population. The reasoning here is basically "X correlates with Y, X is up, therefore Y is up". That's not a strong argument. These data are a starting point, not a conclusion. The authors also seem to be leaning so far into a desired narrative that they can't accurately read their own graphs. The rapid rise in CDS clearly begins around 2000 - not the late 1970s, which are just the low point of the graph.

rhizome 5y ago
Hmmm, maybe it could be called something like "syllogistic materialism?" It's a predictable badness that these "revelations" are specific sentiments about what follows, aka "the nouns" (more or less). "Still feels X," "I am a Y," "everyone thinks Z," all require that X, Y, and Z all have fixed meanings.
christophilus 5y ago
Sounds like you’re saying the authors suffer from cognitive distortions. They’re disproving their point by proving their own point.
- civilized 5y ago
  Their work is definitely an illustration of precisely what they're talking about.
dalbasal 5y ago
In their defense, I tend to think social science is shoehorned into an academic formula that it can never really fit into. You kind of have to have a hypothesis, then "test" it with data. A more reasonable approach (IMO) would be "We found this interesting phenomenon" followed by inevitably speculative interpretation. That's realistically how it works in practice, but to be published you need to fit a popperian formula. A more ponderous version of this probably wouldn't have been accepted. I mean, using a method of diagnosing depressed individuals on a collective psychology of a society is already veering into wtf territory, in terms of interpretation. OTOH, it is interesting and probably significant somehow. IDK how or what they could have done better, and this does seem like a result worth publishing, assuming the methodology is good. Ultimately, I think people reading the paper mostly read it that way anyhow. Authors found X. Seems interesting. Here's how they're interpreting it. Here's my speculation. Journalists OTOH, they'll cite the hypothesis verbatim if it fits the article they're writing. I think that's where the shoehorning is a problem. As long as you're reading the paper directly yourself, who cares what order the paragraphs are in.

ma2rten 5y ago

I don’t think the methodology is showing anything conclusively. The peak could be due to a linguistic shift or due to a difference in the type of work being published. Even if books use phrases like “I am a” more often I don’t think that necessarily means people have more cognitive distortions and if people have more cognitive distortions that doesn’t necessarily mean they are more depressed (only the inverse has been shown afaik).

api 5y ago

Maybe tangential but I have had the sense for the past ten years that something is wrong with human cognition. When I look at the popular ideas on all sides of the political spectrum, the trend seems to have been toward ideas that are not only more one dimensional and extreme but more irrational and incoherent. I regularly come across online comments that are borderline word salad, a blathering incoherent mess of the sort that would in the past have immediately led to questions about schizophrenia. It doesn’t seem to be a specific idea so much as a decline in the lucidity and coherence of cognition itself. The ideas are inane, but I can’t imagine such inane ideas taking hold to such an extent in earlier eras. I have only two hypotheses that seem like they make sense: gamified social media and CO2 concentration impacting metabolism. I lean strongly toward the former because around 2010 is when algorithmic timelines started to be introduced and it was right around then that I remember a tangible sense of sharp decline. I had to include the latter for completeness, but I hope not as the latter would be far scarier. Social media companies are the tobacco companies and opiate dealers of the information age. The more I see of them the more I am convinced they are an objective evil and create net negative value. The algorithmic weighting of content for engagement seems to be the real problem, but it’s at the heart of their business model now.

hutzlibu 5y ago
The more I see of them the more I am convinced they are an objective evil and create net negative value. With invoking the words, "absolute evil", you seem to also take part of your observed trend: When I look at the popular ideas on all sides of the political spectrum, the trend seems to have been toward ideas that are not only more one dimensional and extreme
mistermann 5y ago
I agree...it's easy to not notice I think, but I definitely have the same impression that the aggregate mental health of internet users is degrading in various ways. The mind ingests a massive number of variables as it renders reality, we have pretty decent (if primitive) knowledge of the flaws in this device, and the number of changes in the system in the last few decades is substantial...who knows wtf is really going on inside the 7 billion black box reality machines out there! What we know for sure is that there is major malfunctions going on anywhere one looks, and that's only the ones we are able to see. I think running a similar analysis as this (and other analyses) on the last 10 years of popular mainstream subreddits would yield some interesting results. Or, perhaps a new meta-social-network of some sort will appear on the scene that can point a portion of our massive biological compute power at the phenomenon and try to gain some understanding of it. I worry that if something isn't done, the system might start falling apart.

curation 5y ago

It is because the only logic we have left is Market Logic and the only ethical barrier we have left between us and violence is The Economy. The Economy is entirely faith based. And our faith is waning, and among younger generations, is gone. To survive in Market Logic we must act as though we believe we are fully individuated and on our own with bootstraps tugged. But how we actually live is totally, globally interdependent. The pandemic, on top of this, insists on it. This is the source of cognitive dissonance. ( JP Dupuy The Economy and The Future)

voidhorse 5y ago
Quite a few theorists have stated things along the same lines, and I think the analysis is generally correct. After the “death of god”, man lost a common frame of reference and replaced highly spiritualized modes of existence for highly economic modes of existence. Well, now we are facing the “death of the market” and finally realizing that it is a destructive fiction and that it is not reasonable to reduce everything to exchange value and calculation insofar as it leads to the actual existential crisis that is climate cataclysm.
- yissp 5y ago
  What will we replace it with this time?
  - Animats 5y ago
    I don't know. We're running out of sources of trust. Lawyers? No. Bankers? No. Political leaders? No. Captains of industry? No. Journalists? Almost extinct. We hit bottom when the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts both turned out to have thousands of pedophiles in positions of authority.
    - mvc 5y ago
      > We hit bottom when the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts both turned out to have thousands of pedophiles in positions of authority. Of course prior to 1980, the church had never done anything to harm those it claimed to care for. Not sure why Catholics are singled out here.

derbOac 5y ago

It's telling that a search for the term "sentiment" in the article yields nothing. It's an obvious companion analysis.

ignoranceprior 5y ago
I'd be curious to see how sentiment analysis of contemporary writing has changed over time. That would be easier to interpret than this metric too.
stereolambda 5y ago
As far as I understand sentiment analysis is more of a pragmatic pursuit, and the prototypical use case is reviews of things or creations. It's a business tool and not science. As general language/literature has no set object, I don't see how we could even interpret long term "analyses" of it. It's good that the authors are at least trying to create some generally interpretable categories mapped into language, even if they may not be (yet) fully convincing, as other commenters point out.

cryptica 5y ago

The economy is a negative sum game and so, while the rich keep getting richer and their friends keep getting richer, opportunities for the majority of people are drying up. It becomes increasingly easy for the rich to earn money and increasingly difficult for the poor to earn money. Almost everyone who rich people interact with are at least relatively well off and doesn't have to work too hard for their money so they don't see or relate to the suffering and hopelessness of the poor who are desperately competiting for their attention. Wherever the rich look, things start improving - But where they don't look (which is most places), things are always getting worse. In this crony-capitalist system, the attention of a rich person is as good as money. The monetary system is to blame for this. When currency isn't backed by anything, the economy and society becomes 100% about capturing the attention of rich people. You cannot compete in this system without the approval of rich people. No matter how much better value your products or services may be; you can never compete because their earnings are mixed in with easy money straight from the money printers, yours aren't - You can never beat the margins of a big corporation which has direct currency pipelines to hedge funds, governments, etc... Money should not be so important but when you are far from the money printers, it's the only thing a rational person can think about. Getting the attention of rich people is the only way to get closer to the money printers. It's not a distortion to see things as negative or bleak. Things really are bleak for most people. The real distortion is thinking that everything is fine.

cryptica 5y ago
The comment must have hit a nerve because people are almost outvoting the downvote bots.

Animats 5y ago

This is a very simple analysis. Here's the phrase list: [1] It's quite short. It's clear how they get the numbers, but not clear what, if anything, they indicate. A big problem is that they only count one side. "Fortune-telling: Making predictions, usually negative ones, about the future" - counts the phrases: "I will not, we will not, you will not, they will not, it will not, that will not, he will not, she will not". One would expect that they'd also count "I will, "we will", etc. and show a ratio. But no. This is measuring something, but what? [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2021/07/22/2102061118.DCSupplemental/pnas.2102061118.sapp.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2021/07/22/210206111...

rdiddly 5y ago
Not to mention that "I will get cancer" is a positive statement under that rubric, and "I will not have any problems" is negative. Shocker, you kind of need the rest of the sentence to extract meaning!
Pyramus 5y ago
> One would expect that they'd also count "I will, "we will", etc. and show a ratio. But no. No - what you want to measure is the absolute number of occurrence, not the ratio, the reason being that "making negative predictions" is not the opposite of "making positive predictions". Similar to the fact that negative and positive affect aren't opposites but distinct factors (that share some correlation though!). 'Common sense' can easily lead you astray here. It's a good example for something that looks simple, but really isn't.

cblconfederate 5y ago

Corresponds with the large drop in testosterone levels seen in the past 4 decades, which the authors did not consider in their discussion. Revise and resubmit

PaulHoule 5y ago

It is an incredible result, my first thought is that it depends so much on the sampling of what books get published, and what books wind up in the maw of google books. I have done things like look at specific dates that turn up in Wikipedia and you see some things that are real but when you get close to the time frame Wikipedia existed sampling effects are strong. It would be fun to look at ‘I am a *’ though.

eyelovewe 5y ago

I blame it all on that one Beck song, plus that one Radiohead song

boriselec 5y ago
Loser/Creep were songs of that time. Loser is kinda optimistic though.

ris 5y ago

Complete sidenote, but when did google n-grams start getting attention again? Last I looked at it it seemed pretty dead and unlikely to see any further updates. Now not only is it updated but it has a lot of features I don't remember seeing before e.g. wildcards and part-of-speech wildcards https://books.google.com/ngrams/info https://books.google.com/ngrams/info

saalweachter 5y ago
They also started getting new data again. For the longest time, it ended in 2000, IIRC. My previous go-to ngram to link was "participation trophy"[0], which previously had its biggest spike in the 1950s. There's a massive spike now, starting 2006 or 2008, but my rhetorical point still stands: participation trophies were a big thing -- in writing, anyway -- when Boomers were kids, not Millennials. [0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=participation+trophy&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cparticipation%20trophy%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=participation+...

dalbasal 5y ago

The data is quite interesting, but the hypothesis (imo) is far from the only plausible explanation. I'm not saying this to disparage the work, just to frame. "Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual’s mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books..." Interesting result: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/30/e2102061118/F4.large.jpg https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/30/e2102061118/F4.larg... So... the finding is that language patterns typically associated with depression have rapidly become common in book language. Interesting. The interpretation is up for debate, I suppose. Maybe its just writers are more depressed. Financial events are labeled, but they don't seem to have impacted the data much. Internet usage, OTOH, seems (at a glance) highly correlated to whatever they're measuring. Maybe online culture moved language in this direction with no real relationship to depression. Maybe the internet made people more depressed. Maybe the internet made writers more depressed. Maybe some complicated knot of those. IE, the internet popularized maladaptive language, which has made us all more depressed. In any case, assuming the methodology is reasonable, it does look like they've found something here. Worth a discussion.

joe_the_user 5y ago
I'd be tempted to say the language patterns could be the most interesting thing. They're something that you could was more widely and objectively measurable than "depression". Starting with language patterns and seeing what they're most strongly associated with might be interesting.
wolverine876 5y ago
> Maybe its just writers are more depressed. That doesn't disagree with the hypothesis that it's a society-wide phenomenon.

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airhead969 5y ago

I would posit increased population, shift to cities, fewer close friends, less family relationships, less community, declining interdependency, lower standards of living, and less hope for the future all contribute to depression and so cognitive distortions.

briefcomment 5y ago

What I'm interested in seeing is the types of phrases that dropped during this time period. What is not considered a sign of "cognitive distortion"?

chiefalchemist 5y ago

Has there been a surge, or were previously such things suppressed? Also, most books are marketed via publishers which means there is filter (read: bias) in what gets published and what does not. It's an interesting idea (i.e., analyze books) but the context is going to influence the results.

gmuslera 5y ago

Focusing in just authors may make this fall into the Simpson's Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox), if you look at the bigger set the clear trend may vanish. Even if authors are part of the population and living (some of) the influences that the general population have, there are a whole ecosystem and pressures that should be taken into account, including changes in the editorial ecosystem with time. There are other sets of public data that may or not track the general population, like social networks activity, blog posts and comments on different sites. But that is affected by changes in culture, population and external influences (including disinformation campaings), and the selection of sites may select also the kind of users that may add a bias to the results. I wonder what deviations would be seen at i.e. slashdot that should have around 25 years of comments, with all the previous objections that I already said.

lai-yin 5y ago

5 years ago my therapist handed me a sheet of paper titled "Checklist of Cognitive Distortions." Ten negative modes of thought. I didn't immediately grasp how ingrained each one was in my mindset and habits - it took years and I'm still learning. And one thing I've learned is that there is a wide incentive to embed cognitive distortions in the news, stories, and attitudes which comprise culture. Telling people they are victims of more powerful forces beyond their individual control. Victimhood mentality is the worst mindset a person can have. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemies.

yobbo 5y ago
> Telling people they are victims of more powerful forces beyond their individual control. First, being victim of forces beyond their control is true for almost everyone. Secondly, it's probably more healthy for people to not understand or believe it.
- yourenotsmart 5y ago
  I find it a bit discouraging that the scientific consensus on what's a proper or wrong belief is entirely subject to cultural circumstances local in time and place. Displace any individual considered healthy about 5 decades back or forward and they'll appear unstable. Make it 5 centuries and they'll basically appear fully psychotic (and not just because they just travelled through time).
- orzig 5y ago
  As with so many things, the answer probably lies in the middle. Any of us could be killed by lightning at any time, but 99.99% of us have the power to avoid being struck by a train. Most outcomes, good and bad, lay between those extremes.
- atoav 5y ago
  > First, being victim of forces beyond their control is true for almost everyone. I think this misunderstands the crucial difference here. The phenomenom described is not about power dynamics, it is about storytelling: Many don't even care to investigate whether there are really powers there who are at fault for their suffering. In fact it is quite the opposite: Because they feel special as individuals they cannot stand the idea that some powerful force damages them as mere collateral, because this would mean to admit to be small and insignificant. At least I'd say this is the conclusion they would typically reach after looking into the real causal relationships behind the powers and their lives based on facts. However, it might be much more comforting to tell yourself a story in which "they" target you or your people specifically and intentionally. The more evil you can paint "them" the better, because it makes your cause more noble and heroic. Telling yourself these kind of stories might be comforting, but cements the role you are playing within that society: Forever a sucker, a playball of forces you cannot comprehend, easy to manipulate, gullible, afraid, angry. Healthy as long as you don't march to Russia like my Nazi-grandfather did when he was 16.

lamontcg 5y ago

After having spent way too long arguing with people on reddit, I'd certainly tend to agree with the hypothesis, even if the claimed evidence has a pile of holes. And not just politics. Most people can't analyze a car accident without a pile of cognitive distortions.

lamontcg 5y ago
Then there's this: "I’m a Parkland Shooting Survivor. QAnon Convinced My Dad It Was All a Hoax." https://www.vice.com/en/article/epnq84/im-a-parkland-shooting-survivor-qanon-convinced-my-dad-it-was-all-a-hoax https://www.vice.com/en/article/epnq84/im-a-parkland-shootin...

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ALittleLight 5y ago

I saw on Twitter that you can search for "he said,she said" and you get massive recent spikes suggesting a change in the composition of Google's data. (i.e. More fiction where characters are saying things) https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=he+said%2Cshe+said&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Che%20said%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cshe%20said%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=he+said%2Cshe+...

est 5y ago

Is this Flynn effect in action?

wishawa 5y ago

The phrases are proven/believed to correlate with Cognitive Distortions, but that is when they are used in conversations, or diaries, or maybe short writings. Not in books, which are very different from those things. Doctors don't ask a patient to write an entire book and count these phrases to determine whether or not the patient have Cognitive Distortion.

sadness3 5y ago

I challenge this: > whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways Is it not possible for 'rock and hard place' depression to be an _accurate_ negativity about the world in the face of oftentimes seemingly impending climate disaster?

Gauge_Irrahphe 5y ago

It's from the lack of heavy metals - lead is necessary for transporting glucose to the axon, and its deficiency leads to massive synapse loss and resulting mental illness. The data that supposedly prove heavy metal toxicity are extremely suspect, sometimes outright bizarre. 1. They are elements, so no major changes could possibly occur. Thry appear in all recent geological history. 2. Their toxicity somehow went unnoticed until recently. There are no records of cadmium being considered toxic before 1970. Somehow nobody noticed the toxicity of the most toxic known metal. Thallium was noticed to be toxic soon after its discovery. Lead was only known to cause poisonings in very large amounts and mostly limited to breathing exposure, and was used in things like make up and even sweeteners. Presumably any noticeable toxicity would prevent it from being used in such cases. 3. The purpoted mechanism is absurd. The body picks the metals to be incorporated proteins with great accuracy, and pick the heavy metal, which poisons the protein and activates it when it should be inactive. It just sounds completely absurd to me. 4. Heavy metals only accumulate until certain concentrations are reached, then they start getting excreted. This effect is widely noted.

jbotz 5y ago
Interesting. Any references, further reading?
- Gauge_Irrahphe 5y ago
  See the link above. Also notice the supression of mTOR.
ashleyn 5y ago
> It's from the lack of heavy metals - lead is necessary for transporting glucose to the axon, and its deficiency leads to massive synapse loss and resulting mental illness. I'm going to need a reference for this because I was under the impression that there is no safe level for lead in the body, and it serves no biological purpose.
- Gauge_Irrahphe 5y ago

yourenotsmart 5y ago

So they put any instance of a phrase like "... it feels like ..." as emotional reasoning? Say, "it feels like it'll rain"? I question their data analysis.

ad 5y ago

The paper picks 1980 as the start year…interesting because the recent HN article about obesity-caused-by-contamination post also picked 1980: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27936016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27936016 Perhaps spurious, but could be seen as more evidence for the contamination theory, since depression and weight gain are correlated.

rrauenza 5y ago

For more information on cognitive ditortions, this article does a nice summary... It also claims a similar observation in colleges back in 2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod...

silentguy 5y ago

I think this could be driven by personalization of internet content. It started with the innocuous idea of presenting only the information you need. And, it turned into a system of echo chambers where your world view would be limited to certain ideas that you are comfortable with. And, it leads to lots of cognitive distortions. Also, the abundance of media on the internet force the content of the media to be louder for it to be visible. Nuance has to give way to crass generalization to get deeper media engagement. I seriously worry about the trend and I am not very hopeful about the direction it takes.